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How to Talk to Your Child’s Wary Professors

By Harrison Scott Key May 8, 2015 9:21 amMay 8, 2015 9:21 am

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Prospective students and parents tour Duke University.Credit

In the coming days, at universities around the United States, a miracle will occur. Parents and professors will watch their college students walk with awkward confidence across stages, and for the first time in years, many of those students will be wearing clean laundry. Afterward, those students will want to introduce their biological parents to their intellectual parents.

But wait: They have already met. It happened on the phone, a year or two ago, when mom called to talk about that paper on Schopenhauer or the Shah or, more likely, Shrek 2. It didn’t go well — the paper, or the call.

Things didn’t used to be like this.

College has changed a lot since 1851, when, to gain admission to the University of Pennsylvania, students were expected to complete exercises in Latin and Greek while dueling with pistols. Parents were uninvolved with a child’s college education back then, mostly because of being busy in their own lives with cholera and bear attacks. Today, though, parents are much more involved — texting daily, asking about homework, even contacting professors — largely owing to the eradication of cholera and bears in our nation’s cities.

In my day, if you had asked my father what I was majoring in, he would have said, “Who?” He didn’t know what I did in college, because I was an adult, except in those ways having to do with money and hygiene. If things got bad, he knew somebody would probably contact him, such as the police, and this freedom taught me how to deal with problems on my own, such as money and hygiene and the police.

Two decades later, when I became a department chairman at a university that cares very much for its students, I found myself troubled by how many parents were contacting me. My university emphasizes student-centered learning. We care about students. Which means we care about their parents. Who sometimes, unexpectedly, call on us to show it. It didn’t happen a lot — most students at my institution are fiercely independent and work harder than many adults I’ve worked with at other universities — so when the occasional parent did contact me, I was bewildered.

Sometimes parents called because college was too hard and their son shouldn’t be expected to associate with semicolons, or how their daughter should be allowed to sleep on the floor during class because she has a disorder that makes her believe she is invisible.

Of course, I’m exaggerating here, but not by as much as you might think. It really doesn’t have to be this way. Parents have many resources at a university, most especially the dean of students, who is trained to be nice on the phone to almost everybody. I am no dean of students, but I am an educator, and so I would like to provide a few helpful tips for those desiring to communicate with faculty members, like myself, should the dean of students accidentally provide our contact information to you.

1. Don’t storm in with demands. Just say, “I just want to understand my daughter’s situation,” although in an ideal scenario, what many professors really want to hear is, “Oops, wrong number.” Be patient with us. Many of us are unfamiliar with phones or human emotions.

2. Skip the money talk. You may insist we change your son’s grade, because if he fails the paper, he fails the course and loses his scholarship, despite the fact that he failed to include a bibliography page, as well as all other pages associated with the paper. Most of us have banished the word money from our vocabularies, not because we’re idealists, but because we require space for other concepts, such as PowerPoint.

3. Be yourself. Occasionally, parents play make-believe and pretend to be their children in an email, which we can tell when the address is Judy_mom_of_three@aol.com or because the email is filled with red flags, such as conscientiousness, enthusiasm for learning and correct grammar.

4. Don’t be a bully. If you threaten to go above our heads — say, to the dean — you will likely awaken the hydra-headed beast of bureaucracy, which can result in stiffer policy enforcement for your student. Also, bullying academic types just isn’t wise, as most of us are trained in martial arts.

5. Keep it professional. These conversations can quickly turn too personal, where you find yourself revealing details about your divorce and the trauma this has caused your children, which has led them to attention-seeking through plagiarism. While this personal touch can be effective in country music, please understand that many professors are not comfortable discussing intimate family details with strangers, or even our martial arts instructors, who are imaginary.

As educators, we push our students to embrace strange new concepts, such as deadlines and guidelines and landlines, because many of us do not have very good cellphones, and we must also embrace strange new concepts, and talking to you seems strange to many of us. But sometimes, students really do have infectious diseases that make them lie on the floor and sleep during lectures, whatever that’s called. Cholera, maybe. Parents want us to know about these little difficulties. Times have changed, and we get that.

We care about your student. We want them to learn, grow, triumph. And clearly, so do you. So let’s do this together, and let’s be nice, so that when we meet at graduation, it won’t be too weird. Just normal weird. And don’t worry, your student will be fine. If they have half your enthusiasm and skill in finding arcane contact information, they will have a great future in debt collection or really any profession that requires perseverance. Which is most.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more